The Fallout
I was trying to get my Dude We're Getting the Band Back Together from Phineas and Ferb and I wasn't able to finish today. Needless to say, I've been distracted with the fallout of Tuesday's election. The reactions of this election have been intense to say the least. People are stressed and scared and angry, mostly the latter two it seems. A lot of people are playing the blame game, as people are shocked and surprised. I don't like talking politics, I think I've made that clear before. I think that it's the duty of entertainers to help people forget about the seriousness of things like this and distract them from the hardships of life. That was one of the things that really frustrated me this political season. It's not that entertainers were political, but that so many of them dropped any pretense of being entertainers just to be political. The place of entertainers is remove worry from the world, and not to add to it. But a lot of people have asked me about my opinions to this election. I want to say that I feel relief that this over. Like, this time more than any, we should be taking a deep breath and just thinking about how we're going to proceed. That we can calm down and come together now that the fighting is over. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the fighting is over. Honestly, it feels like everything I said in my Goode Family review has come together at one event. People are protesting all over the country right now, in big cities like LA or New York. People are asking for California to secede from the union. And people in the media and some entertainers are flat out insulting people and literally saying "fuck you." I don't want to give out names, but I'm sure you've heard at least one of them give out a hearty "fuck you" to people for, in reality, the mere act of disagreeing with them politically. Beyond that, most people are wondering "how" or "why" this happened. There are a lot of people I stopped watching, not because I disagreed with them, but because I just wanted them to be entertainers again. I guess it's a little bit different than people acting like the sun was exploding, but otherwise it's the same old song and dance. I can understand where some of this is coming from. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but Donald Trump won the electoral college. And because of stupid, the winner of the electoral college is the one who becomes president. We haven't switched out of it because... apparently it's too much effort or whatever the reason is the United States hasn't switched the metric system. So, let's talk about the first potential good thing that might come out of the election: this may finally give us the momentum we need to get rid of the electoral college and actually have people vote directly for the president. This isn't the first time that this had happened. That being said, the election was a lot closer than the previous times that this had happened. As an aside, the electoral college is the reason why it's incredibly stupid for California to secede from the union, especially for the people who want to secede. California currently has 55 electoral votes and is a major keystone in the Democrats (our left-leaning party here in the United States). If California left the union, that would be 55 votes that the Democrats would lose, making it incredibly, incredibly difficult for them to win future presidential elections. A lot of people are also attacking third party voters, blaming Johnson for loses in Florida. Little do they know that if Johnson wasn't running, those people may have stayed home or even voted for Trump. In fact, if the argument is that third party candidates lost Clinton some states, then it's equally valid that third party candidates also lost Trump some states. And besides, I think it's refreshing to see alternate candidates given so much attention. In Utah Ed McMullin won Twenty percent of the vote. Considering third parties don't usually even get 5%, that's amazing. So... let's talk about why no one saw this coming. The answer is easy. The mainstream media news sources are fucking dog shit, and even though I don't like Trump, I am feeling some serious schadenfreude are their pain right now. Beyond CNN cutting the video feed of someone talking about Wikileaks, or them themselves saying that it's illegal to read, many news stations only polled in highly democratic areas. I'm not sure... what exactly that was going to do, except lure democrats into a false sense of security, but they treated him as a joke. If they took him seriously, then they could have defeated him seriously. Making fun of someone isn't exactly the same as vetting them. If this election was more on policy than character, then it's very likely that Trump would have lost. So, good thing number two - this election has and will continue to be a major blow to the mainstream media that's going to force them to change or to die. I'm sure this election cycle has lost them trust and viewers, and as they continue to insult people (and a lot of people at that, 47% of the country apparently) they're going to lose more. Honestly, the media being so friendly with Clinton was one of my biggest concerns with her. If the media was friendly with Nixon, we never would have heard about Watergate. And it's definitely not their job to intentionally mislead the public. They knowingly spread false information, and that's scary. At the very least, I'm glad that they know that this tactic doesn't work. They're going to blame it on everyone but themselves for awhile, but if they do this again, I'm sure it's going to lead to similar results. What they unintentionally did was create an underdog story, so that's nice. Was I surprised that Trump was going to win? Not as most people. I thought that the media's constant attacks would have worked... better than they did, but I think that the left really underestimated the flaws of Clinton. Ignoring the scandals and the Pepes and the fact that no one seems to have told her that the Cold War ended 25 years ago, she made some politician mistakes. Trump's slogan was "make American great again" and Clinton decided to take the opposite view: America is already great. Saying that the country is good/doesn't have problems is a big mistake when you're running for office. You need to point out problems and say how flawed the country is, even if you're just blowing steam. This is because you need to point out why people need you. And then there's the insults, the "Trump voters are deplorables." I think that was... one of her bigger missteps. Sure, it rallies the people who are already voting for you... but they're already voting for you. And it distances the people in the middle, people who might know Trump supporters. You don't insult the voter base. And it's clear that calling people racist or homophobic or sexist doesn't work. That doesn't mean that people are more homophobic or racist or sexist. It just means that people are tired of it. From what I can tell, most of the people who voted for Trump are from dead or dying manufacturing towns or farm towns that have been hit hard the 2008 recession and didn't see much improvement and have been largely alienated by the left. It didn't work in the United Kingdom, and I was sure that it wouldn't work here. You can shame people into silence, but you can't really shame them out of their opinions. And that's another reason that this election came as such a shock. I don't think that the shaming language is going away though. CNN has already called this a "whitelash," but it's just getting tired... and stupid. White people are the majority population, for starters, so it might not be the best idea to alienate them. Or at the very least don't be surprised when they actually do feel alienated and vote for someone else. By the way, CNN is incorrect... again. 29% of Hispanics and 29% of Asians voted for Trump. Areas where Obama had major leads in 2008 and 2012 were given to Trump. Most people are not racist or sexist or whatever. Some people are, but definitely not the 47% of the population. If they were, we wouldn't have gotten this far as a society. So, let's talk about the fear. I mean, after Trump was elected, Canada's immigration webpage actually crashed due to high traffic. A lot of people are scared. Like genuinely completely frightened, and I have to say that it's never as bad as it seems to be. We do have checks and balances in this country and we did not crown a dictator. Trump can't do whatever he wants, and he's already in an unpopular position. I don't think the media is going to go any lighter on him, and they'll jump and attack any little thing that he does. There are already protests because of the mere fact that he got elected. He's literally not even in office yet and there are protests against him. Anything he does, the world is watching and the world will know. If he actually did implement his crazier ideas not only would he get impeached, but the people would and will stand against him. This is the age of the internet where anyone and everyone can communicate any issue that they might face and it's only going to get more popular in the coming years. And as I said, I don't think most people voted for him due to things like the wall. I believe that because those are the points the left spent the entire time attacking, and he still got 47 percent of people to vote for him. I don't like Trump, but I do feel like media did more than its fair share of fear-mongering. There are legit reasons to be afraid of Trump, but you have to remember that you're not going to be taken away by the gestapo. People say a lot of shit about every politician ever. Remember, people said that Obama was the antichrist too (people said that a lot about Obama for some reason) and we're still here. He was called a dictator and a socialist and everything in between. The media really wanted Clinton to win and that must be kept in note when we think about our concerns for Trump. And there are concerns about him. I'm concerned that he's never held political office before, which can lead to inexperience and naivety. Remember, he got elected. Which means he's either smarter than the media said that he was, or he's the luckiest person in history. We need to step back and look at things, rationally and with a clear head. In essence, this election was a question "with how much you've complained about the political system, how badly do you really want to leave it?" In a vote between someone who embodied almost every stereotype of politicians versus the antithesis of a politician, the latter was elected. And if we had four years of Clinton, I feel that people would have gotten even more tired of it and they would have found an even louder, more abrasive voice. There are two ways we can react. A lot of people are protesting right now because they lost the election, and I think that that might be one of the reasons that they lost the election. Arrogance - arrogance that no one would look past what the liberal media was saying. Arrogance that people wouldn't listen to someone as off-putting as Trump. That's not the way to react. In a democracy, sometimes you lose. If you never lose, you don't live in a democracy. Is our democracy perfect? Absolutely not, but we can improve our democracy and make better decisions and have better discourse, but protesting that the election didn't turn out the way you wanted is antithetical to the very idea of democracy itself. Right now, a lot of people are apologizing for being so abrasive and insulting people during this election. I think my favorite response to this election came from John Green of the vlogbrothers. He suggests that we need to get better at listening to people, and that our political discourse has become too hateful, and that we've found ourselves in echo chambers, and these are concerns that I've increasingly had in the recent years. I have relatives and good friends that I've grown up with that I can't stomach listening to because of this kind of behavior and it's sad and it hurts me deeply. He worries that the architecture of the internet makes it impossible to have discussions that are open and honest with people we disagree with politically, and I can see that. It's so easy to block people you disagree with as racists or criticism as trolling. The big websites like Facebook and Google have shown to have political bias. Algorithms bury us in echo chambers, but I'm not defeatist about this. Change is always possible, and it can happen with anyone. Remember that most of these social media sites are only first or second generation, very few of them are even a decade old. New ones will come along and challenge the old ones. If someone creates a platform specifically to have clear and open political debates, as long as it was done earnestly, I could see it taking off and challenging Reddit or Facebook, because what's thought of "the architecture of the internet" is just the architecture of Reddit or Facebook or YouTube. I've been rambling on for about a hour now and I think that I've said everything on my mind. It's been a strange day and the future is uncertain, but we can still hope for a better tomorrow. In a year from now, who knows what we'll be thinking. If anything, I'm just glad that this election is finally past us. People might start acting normally again. Category:Miscellaneous